Test of Metal

THE METAL ISLAND

The blue star between the dragon’s horns winked out, and Baltrice sagged in her Web of Restraint. Nicol Bolas aimed a toothy grin at Tezzeret, who hung nearby in a web of his own. “You know, these little tricks of yours are actually cute, when you’re pulling them on somebody else.”

Tezzeret managed what was, for a human, a reasonably good approximation of the dragon’s grin. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

“Really? And what exactly are you intending to show me?”

“Good question.” He coughed a couple of dry laughs. “I’m sure by the time you get around to digging into my brain again, I’ll have forgotten.”

“And people wonder why I like you so much.” The dragon chuckled. He turned back to Baltrice. “And you-what an adorable little creature you are. Like a fire-breathing puppy.”

“Screw you, scaly,” she ground out around a clenched jaw, as though she hung on to consciousness by only her teeth. “Your turn’ll come.”

The dragon sighed. “If only I could live a year for every time someone’s said that to me. Oh, wait, I have,” he said. “Keep laughing, gatorface,” she panted, sagging again. “Just you… wait…”

“Do I have a choice?” He reached down with one talon and touched her lightly on the forehead. She slumped into unconsciousness. “Dull. I can stand almost any kind except dull. She just doesn’t have your gift of conversation, Tezzie.”

“She’d take that as a compliment.”

“Hmp. Might be one, too. So-from nothing more than professional interest-after you did the illusion to look like your father, you, what, partitioned your consciousness? And how exactly did you convince Doctor Jest to let you sit around and be tortured for a few hours?”

“What’s really interesting,” Tezzeret said, “is how you’re asking me. Instead of going back to digging around in my head.”

“You say that as though slogging through that septic tank you call a mind might be somehow less than revolting.”

“It’s your game, Bolas. If you’re not having a good time, take your balls and screw off.”

“Clever as usual. Which is less than very.” Bolas went over to where Jace Beleren lay, also within a Web of Restraint despite not yet having regained consciousness. “What’s this device of yours that Baltrice is so anxious about?”

“You’re asking again.”

“Humor me.”

“Let’s just say it’s a mechanical Doctor Jest.”

The hump of scaled muscle that served Bolas for an eyebrow arched. “You’ve finally managed to surprise me.”

“And it’s still early.” Tezzeret squinted up at the dragon, who now was sneaking a glance along the beach in the opposite direction from which Baltrice and Beleren had come. “Expecting someone?”

For a silent span of a second or two, it seemed the dragon would decline to answer, but at length he said, “Apparently not,” and Tezzeret detected in the dragon’s voice a faint undertone of puzzlement, perhaps even dismay.

Bolas gave an irritated snort that blew twin smoke rings uncoiling down at the immobile man. “This device of yours, the, ah-” the dragon began, as if he’d lost the thread of the conversation.

Tezzeret smiled. “You’re still asking.”

The dragon’s distraction curdled into hostility.

“Bugger asking.” He glared down at Beleren’s unconscious form, his eyes slitted in a fashion suggesting that his entire reservoir of malicious playfulness had suddenly evaporated. Gap sparks of lightning leaped from horn to horn, swirling about one another to condense into the blue sun. “I’ll find out for myself.”

“Now, that’s interesting,” Tezzeret said. “Back to the memory siphon-because whoever you thought was coming didn’t show up.”

“Shut up.”

“How is it you know they’re not just a couple of minutes late?”

“Tezzeret.” Nicol Bolas swung his vast head close enough that Tezzeret could clearly see Silas Renn’s shredded flesh, still dangling from tendons caught between the dragon’s teeth. “Keep pushing me,” he growled. “Go on. Keep it up.”

Keeping up the snappy patter became a great deal more difficult when he could smell Renn’s guts on the dragon’s breath. “You’ve gotten very cranky all of a sudden. What went wrong?”

The dragon angled his face so that his huge yellow eye, larger than Tezzeret’s whole head, was only inches from the artificer’s nose. “In no more than minutes, I can make you beg me to kill you,” he said in a low and deadly growl. “And a thousand years from now, if I’m in a good mood, I might let you speak long enough to beg me again.”

Tezzeret stared into his own reflection in the vertical slit of midnight in the center of that great yellow eye. “I was only keeping up my end of the conversation.”

“Don’t.” The dragon had already turned back to Beleren. “If I want a conversation with someone worth the breath, I’ll talk to myself.”

He cupped one foreclaw around the unconscious telepath, and the blindingly white energy of the Web of Restraint detached itself from the Metal Sphinx, binding instead to the dragon’s talons. Bolas lifted Beleren to his face as though the man were a glass of fine wine, and the dragon wished to luxuriate in his aroma. “Oh, Jace, Jace, Jace,” he hummed, softly enough that Tezzeret could barely make out the words. “If you only knew, child, how long I have been waiting for this moment. I hope you appreciate the honor. I expect that your first encounter with our newly minted artificer was at least as entertaining as Baltrice’s.”

As the twisting energy lash of Bolas’s memory siphon attached itself to Jace Beleren’s forehead and the mind ripper’s memories began to flow into the dragon’s mind, an attentive observer might have noticed a slight, almost infinitesimal, deepening of the wrinkles at the corners of Tezzeret’s eyes and mouth, as though the artificer might be trying, and failing, to keep a straight face.

The dragon was, however, too busy with Jace’s awakening in Tidehollow.